There can't be peacemakers when there is no viable peace. The Israelis have deliberately undermined the two state solution with the settlement building. Settlement building to block Arabs being able to have land date back to the early Zionists settling in the Negev. It was successful.
Why wouldn't they keep doing it?
I don't think Ireland and this situation is analogous. Sure there was hatred and violence. But how many Catholics and protestants actually viewed each other as subhuman?
There were zealots that came to think like that because it was psychologically convenient to think like that but there wasn't the same level of idealogy behind it. Even the legend of victimhood doesn’t approach what we see in Israel.
I used to be closer to your position, but Israel will never make peace until they are forced into it.
I wouldn’t regard the two situations as analogous by any stretch of the imagination but I do believe there are far more similarities than anyone in Israel or Britain for that matter would acknowledge.
You can justify any cause through a subjective track back through history.
It really depends on what point in time you want to choose as your justification.
Believe me we were taught Irish history by the Christian Brothers very subjectively over here, but in doing so, we probably have ingrained in us a subjective view, you might say, although we would consider it a far more informed view than your average objective Englishman, for example.
I find the English and British people in general, very fair and objective.
But there are lessons to be learnt in how you deal with other people’s occupied land.
It really depends how far you want to go back to what amounts to a plantation of people of one religious persuasion into a land already occupied with people of a different persuasion.
The governance of the land favouring one persuasion over the other.
The removal of those of the persuasion that don’t have loyalty to your governance.
Fast forward through how ever many decades or centuries depending on where you are talking about and the continued support of one persuasion over the other will eventually lead to conflict.
Believe me their are similarities, but talking specifically of the last 100years or so on this island, baring in mind 1918 saw the start of the British mandate for the region of Israel if I am correct.
We had a rising in 1916.
A guerrilla war after, against Britain, up to 1922.
A civil war after the Declaration of Independence and acceptance of a 26 county free state. The irony of this is that the treaty was signed to stop what would have been a civil war on the whole island. The Ulster Unionists were armed to the teeth and would not have accepted joining the free state and were basically backed by the military.
1923 ended the civil war and a the Dail (parliament) sat.
All plain sailing from there on in?
No.
Gerrymandering and Catholic’s treated as secondhand citizens lead to unrest.
Civil rights marches at the end of the 1960’s
Bloody Sunday 1972.
30 years of tit for tat terrorist attacks on innocent communities.
1998……. The Good Friday Agreement.
People put the guns down and talked.
There were joint referenda in the North and the South needing a majority in both.
An agreed future that can change but needs support from both sides of the current border, whatever that future change might be.
Similarities in cause through history.
Possible path to a future solution. If the will was there.
Personally I have no time for religion and state being intertwined.
Religion should be removed from state.
Anything else seems cultlike.
